Drink your Tea, and Eat it too . . .
One of the latest cooking trends is the use of tea in recipes. I have seen Ming Tsai prepare food using a tea smoking technique in his wok. I recently made the Junshan Chicken with Silver-Needle Tea recipe from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop which called for infusing a little bit of water with alot of tea and adding it into the stir-fry. And I have found an interesting website dedicated to cooking with tea.
TeaChef, created by Adagio Teas, is a community for tea and cooking lovers developed to cultivate the (rather new) practice of cooking with tea. Each month TeaChef provides free samples of tea and encourages you to experiment and come up with a recipe using this tea as an ingredient. The current tea is Kukicha, a green tea from Japan that is an unusual combination of green leaves and thin white twigs. Recipes are submitted and members vote on the best recipe at the end of each month.
Last month Golden Monkey tea was featured. I actually received a sample of this but unfortunately did not get a recipe completed in time to submit. But you can view the recipe archive to see all of the creative things people came up with. There are recipes for desserts, chicken dishes, fried rice and even jelly. But it was the recipe for Golden Monkey Banana Cream Pie by Julie Delos Santos that won last month’s challenge.
I can’t wait to see what recipes people come up using the Kukicha tea blend. I love being exposed to all the tea varieties that are featured each month and to see all the wonderful ways to cook with tea.
